The 2020 Democrats Converge on Atlanta, Signalling Georgia’s New Political Importance

On Monday night, Pete Buttigieg spoke at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta, making his case to be the 2020 Democratic Presidential nominee.Photograph by Curtis Compton / Atlanta Journal-Constitution / AP

Like Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the thirstier precincts of social media, Presidential campaigns are displays of a particular brand of aspirational Americanism. It’s one thing to look in the mirror and see a future head of state but quite another to believe you can persuade sixty-plus million people to endorse that vision. Given the circumstances, it’s less notable that Wednesday night’s Democratic Presidential debate is taking place at a movie studio than the fact that this has not happened previously. It’s even more significant that the studio where this debate is to take place is owned by an African-American millionaire producer-director, Tyler Perry, and that it sits in the 30310 Zip Code, a residential stretch of southwest Atlanta that is almost ninety per cent black, where the median age is just over thirty-five years old, income and educational attainment are below the state average, and more than sixty per cent of residents rent their homes. All of this points to the fact that the Democratic National Committee is holding a debate in a place where it is possible to see both the power of aspiration and the obstacles to realizing it.

It’s been twenty-seven years since a Presidential debate was held in Georgia. “The last one was in 1992—coincidentally, the last time Georgia turned blue in a Presidential election,” Nikema Williams, the chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, told me. The fact that the D.N.C. selected Georgia as a site for a debate ahead of the next election is largely a consequence of the outcome of the previous one there. Last year, Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, ran for governor and became the first black female Democratic nominee for that office in the state’s history. She also came within two percentage points of winning the election, in a state that had been written off as a Republican stronghold since the nineteen-nineties. “Last year’s election: it was absolutely critical,” Williams told me. “What we saw was that, for the first time, people actually paid attention and made financial investments so we could reach our voters. What we took from the 2018 election was that, when you have those early investments on the ground, having conversations one-on-one with voters on the ground, it makes a difference. We know that, had it not been for all the voter suppression tactics, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia right now.”

This is an ambient sentiment among Democrats statewide and beyond—that, barring the suite of tactics that made it harder for people of color to vote in the last Georgia election, the outcome would have been different. On Monday night, Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, spoke at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta, and expressed that same sentiment. So did his fellow-candidate Julián Castro, who was a guest on a podcast the following night at Paschal’s, a legacy restaurant in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, which served as an unofficial headquarters for the civil-rights movement. Given the collapse of the Democratic firewall in the Midwest in the 2016 elections, when states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania voted for Donald Trump, the D.N.C. has even more reason to be attuned to places like Georgia, which could conceivably be part of a new electoral path to the White House. Tharon Johnson, a Democratic strategist who is based in Atlanta and was the National Southern Regional Director for Barack Obama’s reëlection campaign, told me, “The D.N.C. is putting their resources in a state and, particularly, a city that they believe can be part of the equation for a Democratic nominee to get to two hundred and seventy electoral votes.”

The fact that the debate is taking place at a movie studio is also a product of last year’s gubernatorial election. Perry, who was homeless for a time before building a media empire, offers a symbolic message. Atlanta prides itself on its reputation as a city where, as Williams phrased it, “black people can come and thrive.” (The candidates will gather on the Oprah Winfrey soundstage.) But the choice of Perry’s studio, in addition to serving to highlight an avatar of black success, was also more specifically political. In May, Governor Brian Kemp signed one of the most restrictive abortion bills in the country, which generated a backlash against the state. In the past decade, Georgia has become a major hub for film and television production, and there were calls for the industry to boycott it. Abrams discouraged that move and held meetings with members of the industry, in which she asked them to “stay and fight,” by supporting progressive causes in Georgia. Staging the debate at Perry’s studio gives substance to Abrams’s argument: despite Georgia’s current leadership, there is enough change happening in the state to warrant sticking around. “I think the symbolism of that cannot be overstated,” Williams said to me.

The debate has spawned a series of ancillary events featuring the candidates in and around Atlanta, most of them centered at historically black locations. On Monday, Senator Amy Klobuchar talked about election reform at Hammonds House, an African-American art museum in the West End. On Tuesday, Tom Steyer met with clergy and congregation members at a black church in East Lake, a neighborhood on the east side of the city. On Thursday, Senator Cory Booker, Andrew Yang, and Buttigieg will participate in a phone bank with Stacey Abrams, to contact voters who could be removed from the voting rolls, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was a pastor. The same day, Senator Bernie Sanders will follow Buttigieg and speak at King’s alma mater, Morehouse College; Senator Elizabeth Warren will appear at another H.B.C.U., Clark Atlanta University; and Kamala Harris will host a Black Women’s Power Breakfast in the city. But, for all the attention paid to Atlanta–and, by extension, Georgia—as a potentially important focus in the next election, the campaigns must have gone there thinking as much about the state directly to the north.

African-Americans will make up around twenty-five per cent of the Democratic electorate in the 2020 primaries, and they make up about sixty per cent of the Democratic primary electorate in South Carolina, which will hold its primary on February 29th, a month before Georgia’s. On Monday, when Buttigieg made his case to the two hundred and fifty or so faculty and students who had gathered to hear him at the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center, at Morehouse, he was also speaking to that broader black electorate. In polls released in recent days, Buttigieg has surged to the front of the pack in both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, but he trails former Vice-President Joe Biden by around twenty-nine points in South Carolina. Moreover, his support among African-Americans in South Carolina currently rests at zero per cent. When he told the audience that “the path to the White House runs through Morehouse,” he was guilty of flattery but not exaggeration.

During the course of a fifteen-minute opening speech and a conversation with Adrienne Jones, an assistant professor of political science at the college, Buttigieg highlighted his determination to address climate change, his support for reproductive rights, his support for Supreme Court term limits, and the need to treat the recent surge of white nationalism in the country as a national-security problem. He also reiterated his support of H.R. 40, a bill first introduced by the late Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, thirty years ago, which would create a commission to determine how reparations might be allocated to African-Americans. The mayor mentioned his pledge to allocate fifty billion dollars for historically black colleges and universities and repeatedly referred to his Douglass Plan, a set of policy ideas to address racial disparities in health, education, home ownership, criminal justice, and entrepreneurship. All of that should have made him popular with the Morehouse crowd, but, instead, the response was merely polite.

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One problem may have been that, last month, an internal campaign memo was leaked, which suggested that Buttigieg’s lack of support in South Carolina is attributable to black voters’ discomfort with his open references to his homosexuality. That assessment sparked criticism, with Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post and Charles M. Blow in the Times both contesting the idea that black homophobia was to blame for Buttigieg’s poor showing. Fredrick Harris, the dean of faculty in the social sciences and a professor of political science at Columbia University, pointed out to me that Buttigieg’s problems in the state were likely tied much more to voters’ lack of knowledge about him.

By contrast, Julián Castro appeared to resonate more with his audience of about a hundred people, many of them students or twenty-somethings, who crowded into Paschal’s on Tuesday night. Speaking with Angela Rye, a Democratic strategist and a podcast host, he discussed the centrality of racial justice to the larger objectives of the Democratic Party in 2020 and reiterated his belief that the Democrats should not hold their first nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, two overwhelmingly white states, given the diversity of the Party’s coalition of voters. The audience seemed impressed with his fluency in policy and also with his underlying concern that his ideas about police reform, educational access, and reparations are necessary moral imperatives if the country hopes to ever move beyond the divisiveness embodied by Donald Trump. When Rye departed from policy issues to ask Castro who the greatest rapper of all time is, he paused for a moment, seeming to ponder the question, before naming Tupac Shakur—an answer with which the crowd largely concurred.

The D.N.C.’s criteria for participation in this week’s debate required a candidate to have at least a hundred and sixty-five thousand unique donors, with at least six hundred in each of twenty states, and to meet a threshold of three per cent support in four recognized polls or five per cent in two early-state primary polls. Ten candidates—Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer, Warren, Yang, and Representative Tulsi Gabbard—qualified. Castro did not. When I asked him why he had come to Atlanta anyway, he said, “This is where y’all are,” as he pointed to the bank of news cameras in front of him. “This is a campaign, and we want to get our message out.” But there was another motivation. “We wanted to do this event today because it cannot be lost on anybody that Donald Trump is taking civil rights backward. He is the biggest threat to civil rights that we have seen in a long time sitting in the Oval Office. And the fact that we have a debate in Atlanta, perhaps the epicenter of the civil-rights movement, my hope is that, in this debate, the candidates are going to have to address a lot of the issues that I’ve been tackling throughout my campaign.” He told me that his plan is to exceed expectations in polling and fund-raising, in hopes of making it onto the stage for the next debate, on December 19th, in Los Angeles. But the road gets steeper after Atlanta. Candidates will have to clear four per cent in four polls, or six per cent in two early-state polls, in addition to having two hundred thousand unique donors, with at least eight hundred in each of twenty states.

We’ve seen a great deal of political theatre of late, most of which has not occurred on a stage. Whatever the sharpest ripostes, the most unexpected outcomes, and pundit-appointed victories at the Tyler Perry Studios, the move to hold the debate there heralds a changing tide. There are sixteen electoral votes at stake in Georgia; six more than in Wisconsin and the same number as in Michigan, two traditionally Democratic states that voted for Trump in 2016. Implicit in Georgia’s bid for the attention of the national Democratic Party is that winning there could offset the failure to regain a Rust Belt state in 2020. Republicans may still have advantages in Georgia, but they are no longer overwhelming ones. The hope uniting the candidates, the Georgia Democratic Party, and the D.N.C. is that the aftermath of losing the last election in the state has opened the door to winning the next one.